Managing Customer Experience and Relationships, 3rd Edition

Foreword: The View from Here

When I first started writing about marketing 45 years ago, the Industrial Age was in its prime. Manufacturers churned out products on massive assembly lines and stored them in huge warehouses, where they patiently waited for retailers to order and shelve boxes and bottles so that customers could buy them. Market leaders enjoyed great market shares from their carefully crafted mass-production, mass-distribution, and mass-advertising campaigns.

What the Industrial Age taught us is that if an enterprise wanted to make money, it needed to be efficient at large-scale manufacturing and distribution. The enterprise needed to manufacture millions of standard products and distribute them in the same way to all of their customers. Mass producers relied on numerous intermediaries to finance, distribute, stock, and sell the goods to ever-expanding geographical markets. However, in the process, producers grew increasingly removed from any direct contact with end users.

Producers tried to make up for what they didn’t know about end users by using a barrage of marketing research methods, primarily customer panels, focus groups, and large-scale customer surveys. The aim was not to learn about individual customers but about large customer segments, such as “women ages 30 to 55.” The exception occurred in business-to-business marketing, where each salesperson knew each customer and prospect as an individual. Well-trained salespeople were cognizant of each customer’s ...